Face in the clouds

Our friends at Fortean Times have posted a bunch of new reader-submitted "simulacra photos." In Fortean terms, simulacra photos depict "spontaneous or natural figures or images. These can occur in nature as well as in the chance conjunction of artefacts." This cloudy face was snapped last winter with a phonecam in Sittingbourne, Kent, England. Link

The human brain is an incredible pattern recognition machine – and had been honed by evolution to recognise faces. But sometimes it’s a little too eager and produces false positives (hence the man/men in the moon, for example). I can see at least three distinct, humanlike faces in this cloud formation. (One in profile, looking to the right, one chubby childlike face with small eyes looking down and to the left, and another mournful face looking down/right). This is just an artefact of over-powerful pattern recognition algorithms running on insufficient data…and not really newsworthy